The Bros Who Met Their BFFs on Bumble

It was like any blind date in 2016. Guy swipes right, makes small talk, extends a casual invite for drinks at a hip, dimly-lit bar. There’s the cautious excitement—maybe this could actually be something!—tinged with nerves from watching The Craigslist Killer too many times. What if he lures me into an alley and no one ever sees me again?

It was all of those things, except the bros weren’t swiping for hookups. Brandon O’Leary, a 26-year-old bartender in New York, was biding his time as he waited for the guy he met on BumbleBFF, an extension of the Tinder-like app but focused solely on friendship, to arrive. He’d invited him to the bar where he works, a trendy cocktail den in the East Village, thinking it would be a safe spot to meet a stranger from the Internet. O’Leary wasn’t worried about making a good impression (“I'm an amaaaazing human,” he says, with scant irony), but he was a somewhat concerned that his potential new friend, Berlin, would be a little weird.

“It's kind of scary, like, what is this guy gonna do? Is he gonna be weird? Is he gonna get drunk in my bar and, like, creep on girls all night?” O’Leary recalls thinking. “I kind of know how you girls feel now.”

He tried to push those thoughts out of his head when Berlin walked in the door. “I'm a hugger,” he tells me. “I just kind of hugged him and I was, like, 'Yo, what's up, man, we're friends now! Get over it.' And sat him down, made him a drink.”

BumbleBFF launched in March with a focus on helping women find friends. In a video announcing its debut, three twentysomethings who wouldn't look out of place in an Urban Outfitters catalogue laugh together on a sun-kissed pier. “We’ve helped you find love,” the on-screen text reads, “now it’s time to find a bestie.” A litany of “I Tried This” stories popped up from writers on women-focused websites like HerCampus, Oxygen and EliteDaily.

But the app isn’t exclusive to those with a double X chromosome. According to a Bumble spokesman, 90 percent of male Bumble users have also opted into the BFF feature. And while Bumble didn’t have stats on how many guys had matched, of the ones who have, more than half have started conversations. The whole idea for the feature, says Alex Williamson, the Bumble's vice president of brand content, came from users—both men and women—clamoring for a friend finder.

“Whether you're a guy or a girl, you are looking for friends,” Williamson says. “Say you've moved. Or you're married, and your friends are still single. Or maybe your friends are all getting married and you're still single. Everybody's looking for somebody to connect with.”

William Crouse, a 27-year-old freelance producer in Brooklyn, got on Bumble BFF shortly after it launched. He had a good group of friends, but they were all from similar circles. “I find New York to be somewhat fragmented, in terms of communities,” he says. “I wanted to find a different avenue, rather than just meeting up with people that I work with.”

So he made a profile—being careful to select only the “BFF” option so his profile wouldn’t show up to single women and cause confusion among his girlfriend’s friends—and started swiping, using similar metrics for what he’d look for in a “relationship relationship” with a woman. “Profile pictures can say a lot,” Crouse says. “Not necessarily that I'm looking for a dude that's attractive, but I think, in terms of activities and stuff like that, I don't want to hang out with a dude who's really into punk or metal and has a black mohawk going on. So I think the pictures are important because you're kind of picking up on a lot of cues there, in terms of, 'Are they active? Have they lived in New York for a while?’”

"I just kind of hugged him and I was, like, 'Yo, what's up, man, we're friends now! Get over it.' And sat him down, made him a drink."

He initiated conversations with around 30 guys. Because the ersatz flirty banter was a little awkward, he tried to cut to the chase early. “I want to build up a relationship to hang out with somebody rather than just, like, text a dude,” he says. “It kind of goes quickly to, 'Are you around this weekend? Let's grab a beer.'”

After going out with some duds (“We met up and he was fine,” Crouse sighs, recalling one guy, “but I just didn't really... you grab drinks with somebody and you can tell pretty quickly, like, do you want to hang out with them again? And I was like, 'Nah’”), he matched with Jack, a fellow Brooklynite, and invited him to grab a drink with a group of his friends at a dive bar in DUMBO. Their connection was undeniable. “It felt very natural. And I think that was one of the keys,” Crouse says. They talked about movies, their girlfriends, what they were watching on Netflix. “It wasn't really like we were meeting for the first time in that it was going to be a burden to get through conversation. It kind of just went smoothly.”

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That was back in March. They hang out regularly now, and do “friend stuff”—going to movies, drinking beer, eating out. “I think that's, like, a pretty good example of a Bumble BFF success story,” Crouse says.

The app would have been a big help when he was new to the city. When he first moved to New York after college, he had a hard time finding his place in the bustle. “The loneliness is pretty real,” he says. “Not only can it be difficult to connect with people in New York, because everyone is so busy, it also feels really lonely when you're walking on the streets and you see so many people, and you're kind of wondering, subconsciously or consciously, you know, how are these people doing it and I can't?”

Anything that can speed that process along, he continues, is “extremely valuable.”

And while apps are an unconventional route to finding your new IPAs-and-FIFA buddy, Crouse isn’t worried about what people think of him. Like dating apps, “it will probably start losing the stigma once there's a significant amount of traction, and it's able to shake its naysayers a little bit.”

Rob Garfield, a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote Breaking the Male Code: Unlocking the Power of Friendship, chalks any stigmas up to the deeply ingrained idea of what a Real Man looks like: emotional restraint, independence, avoiding physical affection. (Men sound like cats.) “Men are very shy to admit that they want good friends,” he says. And, for straight guys, there may even be an underlying fear that a bromantic overture may be construed as a sexual advance. Garfield says that guys can easily transfer their skills picking up women to finding friends. “There's a lot of getting closer to men that's similar behavior to if you're asking a woman out on a date,” he says. “You really have to do some reaching out.”

When you first open Wolfpack, an event-based app that connects dudes with similar interests looking to make friends, you can tell it’s made for red-blooded men who’ve watched The Hangover at least fourteen times. Its logo, a howling wolf silhouetted against a moon. Upon signing up, you select your interests, from stereotypically dude hobbies like “cars” to what kind of music you’re into to what you like to drink (wine? sake? champagne?). Finally, you can add guys with similar interests to your “pack.”

Nile Niami, the app’s founder, says he came up with the idea when his friend was going through a divorce. The buddy, who’d been married for 10 or 12 years, had “lost touch with all of his male friends, and he had no outlet of any kind to find anybody to hang out with,” Niami recalls. When guys get into a relationship, he reasons, they often neglect their male friendships. And if they break up, or get divorced, they’re hard up for companionship. “They're looking around, and what are they gonna do? Go to dinner alone? Go to a club alone? Go to a bar alone?”

Launched in January 2015, the app has a userbase of “between 12,000 and 15,000,” according to a spokeswoman, mostly in New York and Los Angeles. A big part of the app’s structure is creating and listing nearby events, like weekly poker nights or World Series watch parties at the Cubs bar. Yet when I made a phony profile to explore the app, no events were listed in the DC-area, and the dude who shared the most of my shadow-guy’s interests—movies, museums, tacos—hadn’t been active on the app in two months.

But it worked for Rob Levy and John Rocha. Levy, a 41-year-old who works in healthcare software development in Santa Monica, says that last year, a lot of his friends were getting married, having kids, and not having a lot of time to do the things they used to do together, like watching games. Meanwhile, Rocha, a 45-year-old actor in Hollywood, had just broken up with his girlfriend of five years. Deep in a post-break-up Internet hole one day, Rocha found an article on BroBible.com (“which I almost never read,” he assures me) about Wolfpack, and decided to try it out.

I had never read BroBible.com, but when I searched for the article about Wolfpack—which started "Bros before hoes. Balls before dolls. Nuts before skinny sluts. Compadre before I bang tu madre. Male erection before One Direction"—I saw why Rocha was shy.

They both found themselves at a Wolfpack-arranged meet-up, watching a Clippers game at a bar in Santa Monica. Once they got over the initial awkwardness of being strangers meeting up at a bar, Levy says he and Rocha “just chatted, and we clicked.” That was about a year and a half ago, they figure, because it was when the Clippers’ star forward Blake Griffin was all the rage. Since then, they’ve watched more Clippers games, Griffin punched his friend, and now they meet up at free Thursday concerts at the Santa Monica Pier. “Dudes, by nature, are not the most forthcoming with their emotions, and forthcoming with wanting to connect,” Rocha says. “But we do secretly want to find our packs.”

After O’Leary, the East Village bartender, welcomed his new friend with a bearhug, they chatted about all sorts of things: “women, work, our aspirations,” he recalls. It was Fashion Week, so they compared schedules to see if they could meet up at any shows. In between Berlin’s work travel and O’Leary’s busy schedule, they’ve hung out a handful of times since. “I consider him a friend now,” he tells me.

“Would you consider him your BFF?” I ask.

“I wouldn’t say BFF just yet,” he says, enunciating each letter of the acronym as if to highlight the weight of its status. “He needs at least, like, eight months under his belt. And constant brosé brunches.”

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